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Months ago there was work on advancing Gallium3D's LLVMpipe software-based driver with its OpenGL 3.x support, including work-in-progress patches, but nothing was merged at the time. With that said, it was a surprise to see fake MSAA support added tonight for Gallium3D and used by the LLVMpipe driver so it fakes OpenGL 3.0 compliance and forces the necessary extensions for handling OpenGL 3.2.

While most of the open-source driver efforts around accelerating 2D with OpenGL are centered on GLAMOR, a set of patches were published today that provide performance improvements to the XA Gallium3D state tracker that also accelerate 2D using 3D driver code.

With the exciting news that Mesa 10.2-devel is landing in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for providing the best possible open-source 3D driver experience, here's a round-up of the most interesting features that have been merged so far into this next Mesa release.

While it didn't look like Fedora 20 would end up having Mesa 10.x as a stable release update but would be stuck to Mesa 9.2 for the duration of the F20 lifespan, it now looks like an update to Mesa 10.0 will end up happening for stable Mesa users.

In verifying and complementing the major R600/RadeonSI performance regressions noted earlier today for a wide-range of AMD Radeon hardware, here's some more tests that were done this weekend on a different system that also finds the newer code to be running slower than Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1

While Fedora 20 is looking to land GNOME 3.12 as a stable release upgrade, the developers normally shipping a bleeding-edge Linux graphics stack haven't sent down any stable release updates for the much-improved Mesa 10 drivers. Fortunately, there's some unofficial choices.

GLX_MESA_query_renderer is the extension devised by Mesa developers for universally exposing details of the system's OpenGL driver, GPU, and system information in order to assist game developers, among other OpenGL developers. Patches have finally emerged for supporting GLX_MESA_query_renderer by all Mesa and Gallium3D graphics drivers.

The OpenGL NV_non_square_matrices extension for Mesa has now surfaced in the form of six patches on the developers' mailing list by a new developer looking to get involved with this open-source 3D library and driver project.

I must say I am rather impressed with both Unigine Heaven and Unigine Valley finally running well -- and with decent speed -- when using the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver in the soon-to-be-out Mesa 10.1.

Just this morning I was writing about the performance enhancing HiZ feature coming to Broadwell within Intel's Mesa driver, plus other improvements. Prior to calling it a day, more Intel Broadwell enablement changes have landed inside this open-source 3D driver.

A few months back upstream Mesa developers began assembling a list of easy projects to get started in Mesa 3D driver development. New open-source developers were quick to start working on these easy projects and now the list has been updated with some more easy action items if you want to venture into the world of open-source GPU driver development.

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